“Yes.” He thought some more—it was disturbingly difficult, a physical strain—and looked at Lord Uyane…Jazuun. “You found us? How?”

“Tripped over you on my way to Xi’Matezh.”

“What were you doing there?”

Jazuun snorted and shrugged his spines. “Said I went there for Fifth Light, didn’t I? All those fucking bells…I think a better question is, what were you doing there? It’s been a brace and more! I thought you’d gone home.”

“We were delayed.” Meoraq tried again to sit up and again abandoned the effort. He put a hand on his chest, feeling at the pains within as if it could tell him something. “I don’t remember this,” he muttered and looked up. “How do the surgeons say?”

“They say rest for half a brace or so and if Sheul shows you favor, you’ll be whole as you ever were. You’ve lost some juice and cracked some bones, but none of that was too serious apart from the strain it put on you. It was the wetlung that nearly killed you, boy, so you’re to be resting on your feet as much as possible.”

“And you?” Meoraq tried to raise the hand that did not grip Amber’s to touch her heart, but his clay was heavy. He could manage only to rest his palm on her belly, which he supposed was just as appropriate. “Were you injured?”

“No, for a change. I’m fine. Or…we’re fine, I guess.” She laughed a little. Her laughter, even self-conscious as it was, was beautiful. “I’m still getting used to that.”

“Then all is well.” Meoraq closed his eyes to think some more. The darkness helped. “Are they feeding you?” he mumbled. It seemed very important in that moment.

“Oh boy, are they feeding me. The lady of the house here has been stuffing cake into me with both hands practically since I got here.”

“At least it isn’t marrow, eh?”

“Marrow would actually be a nice change. I could really go for a steaming heap of marrow right now.”

He smiled. “You don’t mean that.”

“Not yet, but I’m getting there.”

With effort, Meoraq turned his attention back to Lord Uyane, who had been watching this one-sided exchange with undisguised curiosity. “How long have I been here?”

“Six days, in and out. You’ve muttered some before this, but this is the first I’ve seen you give sensible speech. If you want to move to a decent bed, I’ll let you, but your woman stays with mine. No arguments,” he added, cocking his head at Amber, who did indeed have an argument gleaming in her eye. “You can see him in my company, but then you let him rest. How in the hell do you get this she-Sword to obey you, boy? It’s like putting a tether on the wind.”

“It is,” Meoraq agreed, petting Amber’s hand. “A fine, fierce wind.” He dozed, fitting himself back in his flesh as if his body were an old pair of refurbished boots—familiar, but stiff and a bit too tight.

Boots…

“Where are my boots?” he asked, rousing.

“Up Gann’s ass and around the kidney,” Lord Uyane replied with a snort.

“I didn’t have time to look for anything,” Amber added. “We only have what was already on the sled when I put you on it, and we left a lot of that behind so we could get here faster. We still have a few things, I guess. Mostly stupid little stuff…your tea box…my mug. But…” She took a deep, bracing breath, dropping her eyes. “But you lost your knives. Or I lost them. Iziz took them and I didn’t think…anyway, they’re gone.”

Meoraq glanced at the knife of his fathers resting on his chest, then at his arm, naked but for the cord of her hair. His sabks…? His sabks! Handed down from the firstborn son of Uyane Xaima himself, perhaps the oldest set of honor-knives in all the world, blades that had never known defeat, and now they were gone.

He pulled in breath and hissed it out, pulled in another and just let it go. He reached out and stroked once at his wife’s brow, doing what he could to wipe away the guilt and shame she carried there. “So they are gone,” he told her. “Uyane Xaima was only a man. His sabks were only metal. And what does it matter now, eh? The Age of the Warrior is ended. It is only right that they end with it, there…where it all began.”

He had managed somehow to forget they were not alone in this room until Lord Uyane said, “Ended.”

They both looked at him and then beyond him to all those other watching, listening, invisible servants. Alarm flared in Meoraq’s chest as hot as fever, but Jazuun didn’t seem all that upset. Or even surprised.

“I knew it just by looking at you. Even at your worst, I could see it on you…on both of you.” Jazuun looked them over—first Meoraq, then Amber—and raised his chin like a true Sword in judgment. “You opened the doors at Xi’Matezh, didn’t you? You entered before it fell.”

Alarm flared again, which was twice too often for his ill-used clay. Meoraq put a hand over his heart to steady it and kept his spines still. “You don’t blame me for that, surely.”

“Blame you?” Jazuun tipped his head back in mock puzzlement. “It was God who held the shrine up all these ages. How is it that you dropped it? Although if any man could…If you can walk,” he said suddenly, “there’s something I want to show you.”

A strange sort of knowing entered Amber’s face. She looked at Jazuun and then at Meoraq, biting at her soft lip, and finally shook her head. “Come and see,” she said, holding out her hand.

Meoraq consulted his clay, which had used the little time since his awakening to decide it was not dying after all, but which had not yet decided whether or not it was glad to hear that. He sat up, clasped Amber’s little wrist in one hand and Lord Uyane’s considerably more helpful one in the other, and heaved himself over the side of the sickbed and onto his feet. Standing was bad enough; walking, where every step jostled the broken shards of hell occupying his lungs, was worse; the worst, what Amber would call the frosting on the shit-cake, came when Lord Uyane opened the door and Meoraq found the hall simply choked with people, startling him into an unplanned, “Fuck Gann!” for all of them to witness.

His voice rolled out in a fine, firm thunder, silencing all the mutters, coughs and shuffling that large crowds produce, and as one body, all turned to stare at him.

And there he stood in nothing but a loin-plate—an adolescent nightmare come to horrifying life.

“Motherless pack of ghets,” Jazuun said, but he said it under his breath and when he stepped forward to clear a path, he did it without slapping or swearing. The crowd, a faceless mass of rich robes and garish jewelry, gave ground with great reluctance and no small amount of posturing. These were not servants, scribes, messengers or any other breed of man Meoraq was accustomed to see collected in another man’s halls. These were priests, landholders, judges, lords—the wealthiest and best-bred that Chalh had to offer. He saw, by God, the standard and flashes of the governor, jostling and being jostled by those of the Great Houses, the Temple, the Tribune and—

Meoraq cocked his head, then raised his arm off Amber’s shoulders and aimed it like a spear into the crowd, trapping one man in frozen horror at the end of his pointing hand. “Ylsathoc Hirut!”

Like the cursed virgin in that old knee-time tale, hearing his name freed Exarch Ylsathoc from his paralysis. “I knew I knew that name,” he whispered, backing clumsily away. “I knew I knew that name!”

Lord Uyane was waiting beside the open door to a stairwell, so Meoraq moved on, but he was loathe to let his prey escape unscathed. “Keep him close,” he told Jazuun at the door. “I’m going to need provisions.”

Jazuun eyed him curiously, then shrugged his spines and signaled a guard. The unfortunate exarch was escorted from the hall, gesticulating wildly and making vague, incoherent allusions to all the places and people who were at this moment expecting him, including his infirm father.

“You really are a scaly son of a bitch sometimes,” Amber said, leading him onto the stairs.